Sour Times… for Architectural Criticism

 

While an ‘overheated debate’ has just turned sour* around the Chicago Architecture Biennale and its critics, I thought this was an excellent opportunity to unashamedly publicize my own recent reflection on current architectural criticism.

The piece came out on E-flux a couple of weeks ago, and is accessible to everybody without any paywalls or difficult-to-find print publication – one of the reason why I decided to have it there, rather than in any other outlet.

After all, this or any other piece of reflection will today be scarcely paid – in this or any other medium – so if one is certainly not going to make a living out of writing, why shouldn’t one favor the platforms that reach a wider audience without any barriers?

Here, I offer you one of the short-stories I included in “Five Meta-Reviews and Some Footnotes on the (Im)Pertinence of Architectural Criticism.”

This is actually my favorite of five micro-narratives. As it is usual in its specific literary quality, science fiction really serves well the purpose to interrogate what is emerging around us…

 

A Tower

 

John blinked one eye, then the other. The newsfeed started to feed into her retina in a joyful cacophony of ads, algorithm-selected content, and personal video-messages. She hit pause in her temple and jumped to the desk chair on the other side of her 7.5sqm cubicle in the Newark expanses. Her latest successful IkeaRabbit bid had been confirmed while she slept, tagged with a 12-hour deadline, Hong Kong time. She now had 1 hour and 34 minutes to do the obituary.

The HKNYT local editors had thought it would be fun to do arch-obits to keep Manhattan’s memory alive after the great ’29 quakes. Some called it ruin porn, but every day a new tower was revived in 6D from its own rubble, and its 1k-story dully fed into the global newsfeeds. Today was the twenty-fifth anniversary of 432 Park Avenue’s “topping out” (as they used to say).

Rafael Viñoly Architects, 432 Park Ave , 2011–2015. Photo: Peter Sesar/ Wikimedia Commons, 2017. Via E-flux.

As she called out the building’s name into FountainApp, the left screen started pouring out data into different columns. As most self-appointed art critics, she always went first for AGR ratings. Yet, if she wanted to avoid a blatantly negative yield, she had to balance it with specialist social media and a couple of academic feeds from wisdomquotes.com.

Guidelines also determined that she ought to include at least one piece of self-referential archive info from the old nyt.com. Fortunately, most AGR top-rated material came from there. In this case, she realized, most of it came from 425 commentaries on one single piece published at the time of the building’s completion. She dived into the first entries:

1. I can see this building from where I live. To me it’s a colossal monument to wretched excess and megalomania. I’m sorry it’s there.
2. A vertical ghost-town, standing as a monument to excess.
3. So, we’re supposed to welcome this phallus into the pantheon of noteworthy Manhattan architecture because the developer says we should?
4. Some people call 432 phallic; I call it a giant middle finger extended upward.
5. An astonishing addition to the panoply of useless, and utterly irrelevant residences for non-resident buyers.
6. I am not particularly upset about the proboscidian height and arguably unimaginative architecture of the 432 Park Avenue building, per se. Times change, cities grow, and architectural taste is subjective. What upsets me most is that this building is symptomatic of Manhattan’s decline as a place where people of moderate means can afford to build a life, raise a family, and be part of the wonderful history here.
7. It looks like the architect was poking fun at modernism. The perfectly square windows and extreme height make it a caricature of the modernist skyscrapers it’s surrounded by. It’s a perfectly contextual, satirical building.
8. This odd fixation with the material side of things at the expense of their aesthetic value (or lack of it) speaks volumes, and it promotes a culture of dumb strength.
9. As an architectural form, I think 432 Park Avenue is beautiful in its simplicity and symmetry. As a reflection on our city and society, the view is much less pleasant.
10. The clicking of boot heels on cold concrete. The distant churning of a furnace. An ocean of unreckonable souls reflected outwards, away, in the gloss of a pure and total pane of triple layer bulletproof tempered Paramount™ glass.
11. … (1)

This was truly the voice of the people as scored by their attention-grab nodes. Since Applefabet had secretly started to record and keep neuronal information from readers’ retinas around the mid-teens, this rating was the most reliable source for juicy, fun stuff.

She had a $9.99 budget for samples, and only from authorized PremiumWiki pages. So, any online vox populi had to be manually twisted and made invisible to piracybots. That was her job. And, with a little help from her apps, she excelled at it.

She spent the next 15 minutes selecting an amount of relevant information from other sources. From what seemed like one of the few specialist magazine publications on 432, she picked a nice contrasting opinion from one Aaron Betsky: “The tower’s very appearance represents the transformation of this and every other city into a place for the wealthy to live and play, but on the other hand it does so with an elegance, borne out of its simplicity as much as its height, that make it clear that it is still possible to make a beautiful skyscraper.”(2)

From another source, the single academic review she could find on the tower, she collected a cool-sounding theoretical reference: “Here, myths such as the democratic equanimity of the market and the rationality of global capital—performed in the repetition of squares, the flexibility of plans, and the durability of materials—are exposed in the act of their reproduction.”(3)

As she went along, she couldn’t help noticing that the building had elicited a lot of arguments on economic inequalities, which were now mostly incomprehensible. When the wealthy and powerful migrated to their cryopods and started to control things from their virtual paradises, such debates had become outmoded.

Even so, for the sake of context, she threw in a quote from a then famous business magazine: “The ascendance of 432 Park Avenue to its now-dominant place in the skyline says more about the state of our world than a thousand Thomas Pikettys typing on a thousand keyboards ever could.”(4) She was unsure this bit would fit in, but she liked the sound of it, and guessed the app would sort it out.

She fed it all into WordAI5.0.

Any arrangement of more than three words showing any resemblance to the original text was automatically presented between quote marks, permanently hyperlinked to the original and, once signed off, charged from her personal account. She used to joke that writing was now all about chasing inverted commas.

It took her another 28 minutes to edit connections, substitute words where needed, censor any ideological hues that the AI might have overlooked, and even add a personal flourish.

She re-read the piece, checked the 1000-character count, and felt good. She called out “Send!” and looked at the clock. She rejoiced, having made it 35 minutes before the deadline, adding a few precious credits to her online profile.

Now she could hit the shower, reconnect to the flow of her newsfeed and, like everyone else, wait for the notification on her next effective bid on IkeaRabbit.

 

Notes

1. To the exception of points 7 and 10, all quotes from New York Timesreaders, on the piece Matt AV Chaban, “New Manhattan Tower Is Now the Tallest, if Not the Fairest, of Them All,” New York Times, October 13, 2014. Comment 7 taken from a comment placed on thisgreatname, “How do you architects like this building in Manhattan. It is referred to as 432 Park Avenue, but I like to call it ‘Stick Building’,” reddit, November 6, 2017, by ThatGreyKid.
2. See Aaron Betsky, “432 Park Avenue and the Importance of Being There and Being Square,” Architect Magazine, October 16, 2014.
3. See Jacob Moore, “432 Park Avenue: Pointing Fingers,” The Avery Review 4 (December 2014).
4. See Joshua Brown, “Meet the house that inequality built: 432 Park Avenue,” Fortune, November 24, 2014.

*Here’s your soundtrack.

Them or Us: Matters of Concern

 

The ambivalent idea of ‘them or us’ eloquently reflects some of the matters of concern that have occasionally propelled my past curatorial projects.

When asked for a contribution to an exhibition‘s catalogue of that same title, I proposed a walkthrough through some of those matters of concern.

Originally written in 2017, these arguments have since been lying dormant in another curator’s dream of a yet unpublished book.

Now, it felt urgent to spurt these stories out.

For one, because their timeliness may wane. There is a precise moment for everything, and our minds will certainly and hopefully fly away from our darkest considerations at one given moment. And for the other, because perhaps my own curatorial path has come to an interesting turning point.

After four blissful years at one of the most prestigious museum institutions in the world, and after another four schizophrenic years in Lisbon launching a museum at the intersection of contemporary art, architecture and the impacts of technology, it certainly feels like the sucked-out, turned-to-entertainment cultural arena is no longer the place from where one can address some of the matters of concern that affect our world today.

Perhaps writing is one good platform to address such matters of concern– and so perhaps I should again cherish this outdated blog format.

Or perhaps I should work harder on that plan to bring curatorial knowledge to those few cities and philanthropic institutions that have already come to realize they must redirect their resources in preparation for coming emergencies – but are still lacking the connections to the appropriate art and design intelligence.

For sure, in a society that has proclaimed itself capitalistic to death, one can also perhaps take in and accept Regine Debatty’s ironical intuition: we (must) make money, not art.

Maybe business and profit are indeed the ill-fated answer to emerging problems – as the words below may hint at.

As I land in Cambridge, Massachusetts, another blissful year immersed in the expansive intellectual environment of Harvard University will tell.

So, before everything becomes so last year, in this last Sunday* of our beloved month of August, here is my farewell gift to the country where I’ve spent the last four years.

I was seduced back to Portugal by that sort of sentimental appeal to which one eventually caves in for more personal and less obvious reasons.

These included the rare opportunity to launch a new institution, but also to provide your kin with a wider net of resources, including a few years of a (barely) still humanistic European education – i.e. giving your kids a second language in which they can properly express other ideas.

But now, it is time to leave again. Who knows if it is for good?

As expressed by a 17th century thinker that came to my mind during this last year of turmoil: “To be born, Portugal: to die, the world.” The son of a mulato woman, Padre António Vieira, travelled extensively around the world before he died in Brasil.

That is the Brasil that is now burning and was once the destination of a substantial part of Portuguese society, the aristocratic court included. Many Portuguese moved there, en masse and for good, two centuries ago. This became a quite unique, little known colonial history – a tale of ‘metropolitan reversal’ and substitution of a country by its colony, which is still to be unravelled and deconstructed in all its implications – especially for those left behind…

Meanwhile, today, in its desperate, ridiculous measures to lure emigrants back to Portugal, the current government may be realizing too late that one day in the near future this ever-after impoverished place will desperately need everybody that is still being systematically and viciously driven out of the country.

As announced on Público these days, a program of millions to bait emigrants back to the country, decoyed only 71 sentimental and ill-informed individuals.

Madonna or Philip Stark may come and sing idiotic praise of Lisbon, but they will do only while they are bribed with 20% tax rates on their international royalties. Or until they quickly realize in what kind of bureaucratic nightmare they have landed – as Madonna did after only two years – and quickly promise to fly to the next fiscal paradise.

On the other opposite, what talented emigrant needs a 50% tax discount on incredibly low salaries? No ‘talent’ will be easily contented in a country in which the median salary is 950€ – but where a privileged, self-maintaining economic-political chaste diverts millions to offshores while a so-called leftist government coalition cracks down on the basic rights of the less affluent.

The logic of the local, nepotistic mafia, as I’ve heard it put by an insightful and exiled Portuguese researcher at Brown University circa 2012, is still basically the same: let them emigrants go eat cake somewhere else, so the less of us are left behind to fight for the remaining bread crumbs.

But if the day comes when all this exiled talent is needed, ties might be severed for too long for a comeback to be possible.

Think of the Portuguese names inscribed in the walls of the first synagogue ever established in New York, a few streets away from where I used to live in the Upper West Side. As Marx wisely put it, history first happens as tragedy, then as farce. Diaspora is diaspora.

So, in a mood of exorcism and cancellation, I offer you, and the world, a long weekend read: the previously unpublished and completely open-source English version of “Them or Us: Matters of Concern.” (Portuguese original essay here).

 

The Zombie Middle Class

In old John Carpenter movies, as again in the unstoppable awakening of the living dead in recent popular culture, one could already discern those allegories that evoke the indistinct and repellent forms to which the ‘others’ tend to be abridged, and ultimately turned into a ‘thing.’

Alas, when I was preparing the Uneven Growth exhibition at MoMA, in New York, it was the first time in my life in which I started to consider on which side of the fence I wanted – or could – situate myself in this dichotomy of ‘us’ and ‘the others.’

In a city and a country where class stratification is carefully obliterated from any debate – but where economic inequality is as expressive as in a regime of apartheid – we are inescapably driven to reflect on a daily basis about the pole where we might find ourselves, or where we aspire to be within a dual social scheme.

In Europe, while economic stress does not spread from South to North, one still endures peacefully with the imprecise comfort of a middle class generated by the post-War Welfare State.

In the United States, and in a city like New York, the idea of the social elevator associated to the American Dream has long been broken, reduced as it is now to a random social lottery. This is the place where we seriously start to consider if we may be contented with a falsely idealized ‘us’.

Image from Business Insider: The Global Middle Class is in a State of Decay

With the rattle of a middle-class increasingly squeezed between opposites, we discover a socio-economical niche slowly compelled to choose if they adhere by all possible means to the top 1%, or if, without true choice, they let themselves slid into deprivation.

Even if ideologically or culturally one does not want to embrace the 1% – and thus contribute to a growing asymmetry – who in their perfect mind would choose the second option?

 

I’d Rather Not

Although ultimately everything may depend on the difficult art of maintaining all options open, the ‘us’ of an urban(e) middle class in risk of extinction will eventually have to choose between the two ‘others’ that increasingly and radically polarize in globalized cities.

It is certainly not per chance that the biggest growing ‘urban typologies’ in recent years are ‘gated communities’ and… the slums.

The ‘choice’ between these two –or the rising loss of such mirage– is what pervades a metropolis such as Rio de Janeiro, one of the megacities examined and portrayed in Uneven Growth.

Uneven Growth’s blog, with tactical urbanism contributions from around the globe.

As in other metropolises of Asia or Africa for which we’ve harnessed some top critical thinking, the social strata that corresponds to a lower, worthy middle class –comprised of qualified workers and services employees– is now bound to inhabit the city in ‘informal conditions.’ This is the only regime that ‘favelados’, or those condemned to the slums, manage with their meagre earnings.

One should always correctly underline that, globally, millions are escaping extreme poverty. But what is usually and conveniently forgotten, is that such an escape does not necessarily translate into a palpable and dignified access to the ‘formal city’ that fits with the Western definition of middle-class.

More alarming is the fact that, given the evolution of the planet’s ecological crisis and the gradual depletion of its resources, we should not expect this tendency to reverse. On the contrary, it is not difficult to predict that this tendency will rather spread to contexts where until now prevailed the formal regime of a broadly established middle-class.

One should only remember the cautionary tale of Detroit, once the capital of the American auto industry. Or be reminded of how, in the wake of the Katrina storm, New Orleans made evident that urban ferality – or the potential of a city to regress into chaos and a previous evolutionary stage – is always lurking closer than one imagines.

As in other subjects, the research of American military intelligence has already long ago registered these facts with a cold, calculating, sort of mild anxiety.

 

A Lapse in History

When we remember that, in Europe or in cities such as New York, substantial parts of the urban population only gained access to a ‘rightful’ city in the beginnings of the 20^thcentury, we realize how the ‘us’ of the middle-class as we know it today can one day be studied as an ephemeral reality, a brief and exotic instant in the long history of humanity.

As we have discussed throughout Uneven Growth, the slum eradication programs in big European and American cities were sustained by rapid industrial growth – as well as, let’s face it, by the wealth resulting from colonization and the increasing devastation of fossil fuels and the extraction of other natural resources.

Today, however, we will hardly have the resources to control and counter the expansion of new, fast-spreading informal urban developments. The tactical urbanisms addressed in the MoMA exhibition predicted bottom-up solutions for adaptation, more than an impossible eradication.

In this context, it is not hard to anticipate scenarios that align with much science fiction recently produced in Hollywood –from Elysium to Ghost in the Shell– in which informal regimes, radical inequality and generalized poverty fuse and hybridize with advanced, mass-produced technologies.

 The global slum in Neil Blomkamp’s Elysium. Image from solidarity-us.org.

This is the everyday steampunk that has been portrayed by the likes of Margaret Atwood or Bruce Sterling, but was first glimpsed at the level of popular culture in films such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.

Now, after movies have made it distortedly glamorous, it really is the time to welcome the technologically-enhanced slum.

 

Rat Tribes and Other Contemporary Humans

The more dystopian scenarios facing humanity in the near future – as opposed to the 500-year dream of utopia that brought us to the present –  was the theme of the Utopia/Dystopia book, as well as MAAT’s first manifesto exhibition reuniting artists and architects.

Given the sudden turn from utopia to dystopia, it is unsurprising that so many artists today look at the decline of basic human rights in different contexts, often related to the growth of urban informality in an age of ecological distress.

The informal is back, also as an aesthetic pursuit. 

And amid the broad return to a plastic and visual informality, some artists focus particularly on emerging hidden social realities so as to make them visible to the general public.

During the 15^thIstanbul Biennale, led by artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset under the theme A Good Neighbor, some 10% of the 56 invited artists decided to work on the emergence of new, dismal realities of the urban informal habitat.

Originating in different geographical contexts, a few artworks portrayed individuals that some years ago would be happy to be born in societies where slum living had been or was being abolished.

In The Fascism of Daily Life, British artists Morag Keil and Georgie Nettell reveal the degrading shared-housing conditions of young London professionals who, in the heart of Europe’s financial capital, confront the harsh reality of being the first European generation that on average earns less than their parents.

Chinese artist Sim Chi Yin, on the other hand, discloses the tight, unhealthy subterranean dwellings of what Chinese media call the ‘rat tribe’: youngsters who are forced to live in dire conditions to guarantee proximity to their jobs in downtown Beijing.

Image from The Rat Tribe series, circa 2012, courtesy Sim Chi Yin.

During the research for Uneven Growth, similar situations of ‘invisibility’ were found in the neighborhoods of Queens, New York, where incoming immigrants share slum-dormitories by the dozens, in anonymous converted terrace houses.

The difference regarding the past is that the new tribes own smartphones and, beyond their unavoidable fiscal contributions, they willingly play their share in the system of consumption that drives the global economy towards its logical disaster.

As a member of the public wittingly responded to one of the proposals in Uneven Growth, “if you can’t give them bread, give them wifi.”

 

Them or Us

Even in a periphery such as Portugal, the notion of ‘us’ is progressively identifiable –to the extremes of political correcteness and its opposites– with those who have a certain economic or social power, who have come to achieve a certain level of knowledge, those who ‘understand the world’ (including understanding ‘the other’), those who have supposedly deconstructed and overcome their colonial symptoms.

The ‘us’ is also identifiable with those those who still proudly self-classify as middle class, and those who, well, are convinced that they are definitely beyond the evolutionary stage of slum living.

The ‘them’, on the other hand, encompasses all those who are not framed within such diffuse ontological categories.

These include the usual migrants and refugees, the indigenous, those of ‘other races,’ the ‘poor’, but also those who came before us, those who don’t agree with us, those who in one form or another dominate us, and also all the non-humans who, in a forthright Anthropocene age, seem to have suddenly ‘reappeared’ to share the planet.

And it is true that the ‘or’ that sits in-between these two interchangeable realities has a character of radical exclusion, which again and moreover comes down to a Darwinian survival instinct.

If, anthropologically, this instinct has always been present – the survival of ‘our’ group depends on the annihilation of the ‘other’ group – such impulse accrues whenever a generic menace pops up.

If racial and ethnic differences serve to spark the conflict, factors such as the scarcity of resources, not to say the endemic poverty of a region or a nation, as well as the yet only barely perceived effects of climate change, are some of the threats that sharpen the mutually exclusive character of the ‘or’ that sits between ‘them’ and ‘us.’

In the midst of this terse dichotomy, full of inevitable belligerent contours, it is convenient to be reminded that ‘we’ are always the ‘they’ of another ‘other.’

In Southern Europe, as we well know, we are the ‘them’ of Northern Europeans. And vice-versa. In the streets of Luanda, I occasionally felt an entrenched racism penetrating the surface of my phantom-white skin, as I’m sure that all Angolans who do not resemble affluent oligarchs have occasionally had the same exact feeling in the streets of Lisbon.

As another curatorial project came to investigate, one of the less discussed impacts of the climate crisis is precisely the radical increment of socio-economic inequalities.

The investigation for the Eco-Visionaries exhibition and book may well have started with the idea of combining ‘the pessimism of the intellect’ with ‘the optimism of will.’ But, early on, the latter was easily submerged in the former.

After all, it is necessary to state that, contrary to how the news of the day non-challantly put it, the growth of global inequity will not so much occur because the ‘poor’ countries who less contribute to climate change will be the first ones to be affected.

Even in a country undergoing severe drought and increasing desertification, such as Portugal, this is the kind of factoid that seems to have little effect on ‘us.’

We conveniently assume that this new imbalance affects only some distant ‘them’ – a few small island-nations that will sink into oblivion, or, on the other side of the scale, a few African countries whose populations are beginning to fall prey to hunger and thirst.

No.

What is seldom discussed –and only a few dare to suggest in writing, most notably Bruno Latour in ‘Down to Earth’– is that the slow evidence of a 6^thMass Extinction on planet Earth will trigger first famines and war, and then a technological rat race to determine who are the 66 to 97 or 99% of the human population (have your guess) that will face extermination, so that any number from the ‘other’ third to 1 or 3% will comfortably join the new Noah’s Ark.

In preparation to such an event, these cold probabilities imply, first of all, that inequalities must be accentuated beyond recognition, as governments around the world seem to have already quietly assumed.

And secondly, one must actively and furiously create the biggest number possible of ‘others’ that are destined to be erased, so as to start fast reducing the numbers of those who will be able to integrate the privileged group of the surviving ‘us.’

The ease with which, as I write, Donald Trump announced at the United Nations –to no visible indignation– that he was more than ready to eradicate 25 million North-Koreans is, of course, only a bitter aperitif to the coming decades.

If those 25 million humans are merely guilty of the unfortunate fate of living in a mad dictatorship, the less affluent in the United States should start to shiver.

 

An Instagram view of Eco-Visionaries at Madrid’s Matadero.

 

The New Normal

The probable event that scientists designate as the 6^th Mass Extinction, is nothing else than the logic and objective corollary of a thorough analysis of five previous such events. As research shows, along the history of our planet these events have led to the disappearance of most species then existing.

We humans are left with the doubtful comfort that our ancestors were one of the species that survived the 5^thMass Extinction. But we may also cheer with mixed joy that, given the current status of our technology, we may be one of the few species that will also survive the next extinction event.

Even if we are not guided by principles of divine justice, we may lament everything that is already disappearing. (What was that piece of news that seemed so impactful the first time we read it? Ah, yes, finally it is only one million species that are facing extinction. Phew!)

We may also furtively commemorate that there is a strong and perverse possibility that we survive that ugly moment in which the planet will naturally regurgitate and vomit all the garbage that we have produced since the advent of the Industrial Revolution.

Meanwhile, out of the pure need to maintain our mental balance, we will adamantly ignore and repress this seemingly unstoppable progression towards planetary readjustment.

In fact, this extinction phenomenon may occur anytime between 50 to 250 years ahead, according to the degree of optimismof each potential scenario.

As such, ‘we’ may, once again, take comfort from the probability that we will no longer see the worst – even if, with this psychological resource, we are actually (and indifferently) putting our sons and grandsons in the despicable category of ‘them.’

Put in other terms, the emotional readjustment to what is coming will necessarily translate in a need to adapt the human perceptive system to a ‘new normal.’

And this is a ‘new normal’ which is pretty more radical that the one that still inflates the discourses of politicians and economists.

This is not the ‘new normal’ of the economy’s secular stagnation after the great recession of 2008. And this is not the new normal of slowbalization.

This is not even the ‘new normal’ of the rebirth of nationalist and populist base instincts. This is the ‘new normal’ of the long, bumpy road to a potential total annihilation.

And, in this respect, contemporary art and culture may hopefully still have a role that goes beyond a necessary political activism – as I’ve once suggested to the architectural field in MoMA’s exhibition Ways of Being Political.

It may have a role that goes beyond the occasional unveiling of what remains invisible in today’s society, as put to evidence in the video works shown in MAAT’s exhibition Tension & Conflict.

Jorge Macchi’s 12 Short Songs, at MAAT’s Tension&Conflict, Video Art After 2008.

J.W. Turner and the Impressionists have helped us get acquainted to a new industrial era, and transformed atmospheric pollution in a new motif for the Kantian sublime – a notion that, let’s recall it, was itself triggered by the idea of catastrophe, and in particular by the lasting echoes of the Lisbon 1755 earthquake on the thinkers of the Enlightenment.

Futurists and Cubists, on the other hand, helped us getting used to the modern distortions of visuality and culture, ignited by the rise of new technologies that both fed the vertigo of speed or the complexification of urban life, as well as the massacres of World War I.

In face of the new normal’s most superficial signs, many in today’s art field find immediate consolation in the humble idea of ‘resistance.’ In a polarity that since the heights of Modernity is already traditional in cultural production, the illusory attraction of ‘resistance’ orients art towards autonomy, but also more dangerously to an effective refusal to take the bull by the horns.

Yet, while the uselessness of art, usually hiding in such arguments, may still be considered a silly advantage, such uselessness may effectively come to assert art to its own inconsequential mass extinction.

Indeed, in face of the new normal’s deeper character, what would be the advantage of art’s uselessness? Temporary comfort while one sinks? Food for thought while one starves? Or is it just a market strategy to guarantee the symbolic values of an increasing inequality while we fight for the last resources?

On the contrary, I still want to believe that art can again assume the role of an avant-garde in dissecting a yet poorly understood global war. I still want to believe that cultural production, as cultural mediation, will still have a role in that opposition of ‘them’ or ‘us’ that ultimately is the quintessence of the ‘new normal.’

The ‘new normal’ – the expression we now use to express resignation to an era in which nothing will be as before, or as Naomi Klein put it, to a condition that ‘changes everything’ – is surely a good theme for a future curatorial endeavor, wherever that may happen.

I do believe that, vis-à-vis ‘our’ and ‘their’ long path of psychological adjustment to the ‘new normal,’ artistic practices in any cultural field – think of Darren Aronofski’s Mother – are once again called upon to make us cope with the inevitability of living on an everyday basis with the new paradigms of the unequal, the informal, the ugly, and the monstrous.

 

This text was commissioned for the yet unpublished catalogue of “Them or Us: um Projecto de Ficção Científica, Social e Política”, an exhibition curated by Paulo Mendes at Porto’s Municipal Gallery, from June 2 to August 13, 2017.

*Here you find the soundtrack for this post.